SAS card to external enclosure?

[NaCl]

In some cases, simply using a (very) large removable disk(s) can work well for backups. My NAS has only 8TB of usable storage, (4 x 4TB in RAID-Z2), and I use an 8TB disk as one of my backups.

That said, this is a more modern backup scheme for me. In the past, I had multiple tape drives and media;

• DLT-2000XT, DLT-1, DLT-7000
• SLR5, MLR1
• EXB-8200, EXB-8500, EXB-8505 XL

But, when I moved 5 years back, I got rid of all that old stuff, including all my parallel SCSI equipment.

Where the usable storage ends up in the <= available drives sizes, then that becomes somewhat tolerable. But LTO tapes have a 30 year data shelf-life and aren't subject to bearing seizures or any other failure that might result in pulling a hard disk off a shelf to restore from only to be presented w/click of death or no spinup.

At 152TB usable, realistically, my options are limited to tape; LTO-6 in my case.

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[HoneyBadger]

Yes, there were problems with SAS 1 expanders that have SATA disks. This is clearly resolved with SAS 2 and later, (SAS IV / 4 is being released very soon, if not
already). So that advice is basically out of date.

Please note that some of the early problems were SATA 1 disks that used 1.5Gbps. SAS standards no longer support, (or never did), SATA 1 backward compatibility.
There were a few SAS 2 controller chips that did support SATA 1 disk speeds. Even some that did in earlier firmware that later firmware dropped.

Well then consider me absolutely delighted to be wrong on this one.

Still not going to catch me using anything but SAS for high-availability systems, but for bulk media hoarding it certainly facilitates cheaper options.

 

[Chris Moore]

Still not going to catch me using anything but SAS for high-availability systems, but for bulk media hoarding it certainly facilitates cheaper options.

I have servers at work with SAS disks on SAS controllers and other servers with SATA disks on SAS controllers and (disregarding multipathing) there is virtually no difference in reliability, as long as we are talking enterprise disks. If you need multipathing, you need SAS disks or interposer boards, but the rest can be reliably handled by the less costly, plain old SATA disks. I have many that have been spinning happily along for over six years and one of those servers only has had two of the original 12 drives replaced and I have another system that is in that 6 year year zone where I just replaced the first drive ever last week and it only had 10 bad sectors. That server will probably be in service another year or more before we replace it. Dual processor socket 1366 and it still does the job. In our offline environment, they are not so worried about those CPUs not getting microcode updates to correct for Specter, Meltdown or whatever else is new.